Engineering a 100% Wooden Bike from a Sheet of Plywood

YouTube Star and Technology Tester William Osman Tries to Build a Bike from One Piece of Plywood – What Could Go Wrong?

It all began with a 3D CAD model for the bike, a trip to a home improvement store and (of course) some spicy chicken sandwiches.

Impossible engineering: Watch how a team of tech-savvy dudes create a functioning bike with no metal, screws, or nails!

3D CAD Assembly → Real Life Bike

William Osman and his cameraman, “CameraManJohn”, are known to experiment with advanced tech to implement a questionable idea.

This one tested just how far you can take a sheet of plywood.

In order to go form a digital model of the bike, they needed some additional support. With the help of a CNC Router, commands were sent from their computer to cut out each specific part they built-in CAD (Computer-Aided Design).

As easy as this sounds, they ran into many complications.

Complications…

At first, the giant plywood board was a bit too thick, and most parts did not cut all the way through. With some further manual cutting, the team produced hundreds of individual wood pieces for later assembly.

The challenging aspect to come is enabling all the parts to work simultaneously.

Don’t take shortcuts! Another complication faced was that the team did not add tabs to parts, which holds them to the main sheet.

In hopes of not having to deal with cutting the tabs off later, it resulting in parts falling apart. And when the machine rammed one part, the entire cut was ruined. Not only that, but they also had to go into the g-code of the project to fix all the errors. This was a nightmare!

Another lesson learned from this project was that it’s much faster to cut shorter depths of wood. When doing deeper, slower cuts, often times complications were faced.

But, with some fine trimming of the wooden gears, multiple test-runs and readjustments, this team was able to assemble a full-blown WORKING bike with solely wood and glue!

YES, Sweet Success!

Wow. What an exciting and adventurous engineering project. Although this team faced many challenges, including a diarrhea disaster… they continued to problem solve and finally succeeded!

Want to see more? Be on the lookout for Part 2 under William Osman’s YouTube: Where rubber tires and a seat will make this bike unstoppable.

Watch and See Just HOW this Bike was Created: